A Literary Life

The Man Booker judges announce their shortlist on Tuesday.   The 12 novels on the longlist will be cut to just 6.      This year’s panel (Sir Peter Stothard chairing, with Dinah Birdh, Amanda Foreman, Dan Stevens and Bharat Tandon as judges) have a tough time ahead.   For my money they’ve compiled one of the most interesting longlists in recent memory.   It seems like an almost impossible task to cut the 12 to 6, but it must be done.   Here, then, are the six novels I think will make the shortlist, in no particular order: ‘Umbrella’ by Will Self ‘Bring up the Bodies’ by Hilary Mantel ‘The Lighthouse’ by Alison Moore ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ by Rachel Joyce ‘Philida’ by Andre Brink ‘The Yips’ by Nicola Barker The first five on that list seemed easy.   But the final position oscillates between The Yips and Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident.   I plumped for The Yips as I thin...

And in the final of my reviews of Man Booker longlisted novels, I turn to:   Hilary Mantel’s latest, Bring up the Bodies, needs little introduction.   It is the second part of her life of Thomas Cromwell, following on from the 2009 winner of the Man Booker, Wolf Hall.   To say that this novel was impatiently awaited by her many, many fans would be an understatement.   They even did an hour long TV special, with an extended interview with Mantel, and they rarely do that on TV these days.   Writers just aren’t interesting enough (apparently).   It is here that I must admit to being a late convert to Mantel’s fiction.   I read about a third of Wolf Hall in 2009 and found it unbearable.   I couldn’t warm to Cromwell, to the decision to present everything in the first person present.   In short, I found the novel a chore. When it was announced last year that Wolf Hall would now have two sequels, and not just the one that Mantel ...

In the penultimate of my reviews of novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I now turn to:   Tan Twan Eng came to prominence with his 2007 debut novel, The Gift of Rain.   That novel received a large amount of critical praise and saw him longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (won eventually by Anne Enright’s The Gathering).   His latest novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, has seen him again longlisted for the Prize (alongside fellow contender in 2007, Nicola Barker).   That his two novels have both been longlisted for Britain’s most prestigious literary prize speaks volumes about his talents. From the opening line - “On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” – Twan Eng’s novel announces its author’s control of image, scene and story.   Supreme Court judge Teoh Yun Ling has retired from her post in Kuala Lumpur for reasons unknown (to the reader and to the other characters), but i...

In another of the reviews of novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I now turn to: Michael Frayn has nothing left to prove.   Already an award-winning playwright and novelist, he won over the critics many years ago.   He is well known for his farces – the play Noises Off, his 1999 novel Headlong, for instance – and Skios doesn’t do anything to change this reputation.   This is a farce of basest kind, and all the better for it.   The plot of Skios is tough to summarise: let’s just say that two men arrive on the Greek island of Skios, one for a date, the other to give a talk, and through a simple act of misrepresentation by one, they end up switching lives.   I believe Frayn has gone on record as saying he wanted to see if a theatrical farce could work on the page, as a novel – and this is the best description of how Skios works.   It is a theatrical farce that would work really well with actors to bring it all to life.   In ...